Users vent as E-Trade system crashes before Fed minutes

Wednesday, 8 Jan 2014 | 2:45 PM ETCNBC.com

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E-Trade's system crashed Wednesday, leaving clients unable to execute trades just ahead of a market-moving indicator.

Clients of the New York-based company barraged its Twitter account with angry messages and screen grabs of failed transactions—many of which were attempted before the release of minutes from the Federal Reserve's meeting last month. Major stock indexes routinely trade off the information.

The outage, which appeared to happen before 1 p.m. ET, prompted some clients to threaten to pull their money from E-Trade.

"We know you may be having difficulty accessing eTrade," the company tweeted. "We are working to quickly restore full access and apologize for the inconvenience."

That wasn't enough for some users, who vented on the microblogging site.

"This is crazy, and I am losing money," said one Twitter user named Haythem Hammour. "Time to switch!"